Sentimental Education, A - Gustave Flaubert

Frederic Moreau, a moderately gifted young provincial, is ambitious in many ways: he dreams of fame, of vast wealth, of literary and artistic achievement, of a grand passion. On the Paris paddle-steamer which transports him to his home town of Nogent-sur-Seine, he becomes transfixed by the demure Madame Arnoux and, back in Paris, cultivates her ebullient and enterprising husband in order to be near her. Frederic`s devotion fluctuates like his other enthusiasms, and he is caught up in the intense pleasures and the inevitable ennuis of Parisian life. A Sentimental Education was published in 1869, a quarter of a century after Flaubert first drafted a very different novel with the same title. The final, painstakingly written and meticulously accurate version depicts undistinguished people in the extraordinary context of a crucial period in European history: the confrontation between militant capitalism and militant labour which boiled over in France in the Revolution of 1848.